[In the following review, Irwin discusses Ali's utilization of exposition and metaphors, faulting what he deems to be Ali's lack of imagination in Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree.]

“We are living in the most difficult period of our history. We have not had such serious problems since Tarik and Musa first occupied these lands. And you know how long ago that was, do you not?”

Yazid nodded. “In our first century and their eighth.”

Tariq Ali's second novel [Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree], a work of historical fiction, is about the misfortunes of a family of Moors living in the province of Granada in 1500, eight years after the region had been conquered by the Spanish Catholic armies of Ferdinand and Isabella. It is the sort of historical novel in which people like to talk history (“We destroyed two great empires. Everything fell into our lap. We kept the Arab lands and Persia and parts of Byzantium. Elsewhere it was difficult, wasn't it? Look at us. We have been in al-Andalus for seven hundred years …”) and debate such matters as women's rights, the problems of minority communities, the evils of book burning, and the origins of Western imperialism.

Tariq Ali prefers telling to showing and much of his narrative in Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is conveyed through flashback and reminiscence. A man may enter “the deepest recesses of his memory”, while a woman may be “assailed by memories of her own youth”. Elsewhere, another character contemplates “the layers of guilt which still lay congealed somewhere in his mind”, and another finds that the “cellars of his memory were overflowing”. The author is fond of metaphors, particularly confused ones. “Bishop and sceptic, for a moment they remained motionless, facing each other. They had once belonged to the same sunken civilisation, but the universe which each inhabited had been separated by an invisible sea.” The dialogue is decorated with duff proverbs, like “The broken glass has no saviours” and “Only a blind man dares to shit on the roof and thinks he cannot be seen!”.

This is the sort of book where the good are very good indeed. Not only is Zuhayr, the hero, a brave fighter and very handsome, he is also a good committee man and a fine speech-maker: he will mature into a well-respected guerrilla leader, an early Islamic precursor of Zapata and Che Guevara. The Grand Inquisitor, by contrast, is hook-nosed, cold-hearted, greedy, fanatical, and very cynical. His eyes burn and he sneers and snarls a lot. He seems to have stepped out of the pages of a much earlier novel by, Ouida, say, or Talbot Mundy.

There are a number of minor anachronisms. But the chief anachronism stems from a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Having failed to imagine that religious belief can ever be a serious option, Tariq Ali has reclassified all its manifestations. Religion, here, is either the marker of a politically disadvantaged minority community, or it serves as a convenient ideological cover for exploitation and imperialism. So, oddly for a novel which is set in one of the great ages of faith and which deals with the clash between Christianity and Islam, profound spiritual experience plays little or no part in the lives of the protagonists.

As I struggled towards the end of the book, it began to cross my mind that perhaps I was missing the joke and that Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree was intended to be a parody, a sort of Cold Comfort Farm in fancy dress. However, I regretfully conclude that this is not the case, and despite the unconscious comedy, the novel is hard going. As one of the characters in this desperately earnest work remarks, “All that is left … is for us to be inquisitioned. Yes! And to the very marrow of our sorry bones!”